As the Huffington Post notes, “Lopez and Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, have both promoted the idea that the executive branch is teeming with Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters. Their conspiracies became popular during the age of Trump, with members of the alt-right spreading the discredited theories in order to justify their support of the president-elect.” Both Lopez and Gaffney served as advisers to Sen. Ted Cruz when he was running against Trump in the GOP presidential primaries but have since come to back Trump.

Like many anti-Muslim activists, Lopez sees the fight against radical Islam as an extension of the fight against communism, advocating for broad-based efforts to root out what she sees as the pervasive influence of subversives in government. In a radio interview earlier this year, Lopez said that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was “spot on in just about everything he said about the levels of infiltration” of communists in government, so “we have precedent for this where we were not fully aware of the infiltration occurring at the time.”

Responding to protests against Trump’s candidacy that turned violent this summer, Lopez linked the protests to a “witch’s brew” of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, Black Lives Matter activists and a “conglomeration of anarchists, communists, socialists, progressivists, leftists of all sorts, Occupy, Bill Ayers types,” all seeking to bring down “the American political system.” She also warned of “a coordinated effort to involve Muslims into the electoral process,” an effort that she said was being “directed by the Muslim Brotherhood.”

After Trump lashed out at Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim-American soldier who criticized the candidate’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies in a Democratic National Convention speech, Lopez claimed that Khan’s son “died as an apostate” to Islam because he “died fighting against other Muslims.”

The fact that Khan and his wife “chose to highlight that infidelity of their son before an international audience of millions,” she said, showed “collaboration” with Muslim Brotherhood messaging about Islam and in fact was a secret message to other Muslims that “Trump must be defeated because if he is not, the jig is up for all of those who support the Islamic supremacist objective promoted by jihad and Sharia.”

Khan “stood up there and pretended and fed the American people and everyone else listening a load of hogwash that this is not what Islam is, that Islam is not about jihad and Sharia, and of course, he was lying,” she said, claiming that the twisted theology promoted by ISIS is in fact “the truest expression of Islam in the world today” and that Muslims can’t be both faithful to the U.S. Constitution and “faithful to the doctrine of Islam.”

In another radio interview this year, Lopez warned that Sharia law had so taken hold in the U.S. that parts of Minneapolis have become “no-go zones” where “the police don’t go.”

From white supremacists to the radical Religious Right, right-wing extremism is on the rise. Pledge to stand against hate.

To our readers: Right Wing Watch, a project for People For the American Way, is run by a dedicated staff driven to shed light on the activities of right-wing political organizations. As a non-profit working hard every day to expose the Far-Right's extreme and intolerant agenda, our main source of support is donations from readers like you. If you use Right Wing Watch, please consider making a contribution to support this content.